Definition of Duplicate Content?

[samhanrey1]

"duplicate content": your content is being shown on multiple pages locations on and off your site and they don't know which location to show. Especially when people start linking to all the different versions of the content, the problem becomes bigger. This article is meant for you to understand the different causes of duplicate content, and to find the solution for each of them.
You can compare it to being on a crossroad, and road signs are pointing in 2 different directions for the same final destination: which road should you take? And now, to make it "worse" the final destination is different too, but only ever so slightly. As a reader, you don't mind: you get the content you came for. But a search engine has to pick which one to show in the search results, as it doesn't want to show the same content twice.